“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Those are the words of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Oklahomans are seeing this lack of belief in freedom firsthand as out-of-state interest groups seek to raise the minimum wage. Not to be outdone, lawmakers in Washington share the same unbelief in freedom as they seek to pass the poorly named Credit Card Competition Act.

The CCCA attempts to push down interchange fees—or “swipe fees”—for credit card users by prohibiting banks from requiring merchants to use a specific network like Visa or Mastercard. The purported reason for doing so is to increase competition among payment networks. But market competition isn’t achieved through government mandates, and the CCCA primarily serves to expand the role of the federal government—and worse, the Federal Reserve—in the credit card market.